Breaking Optimization Patterns for Search Engines

Many years ago when the search engine marketing industry began there was no problem with adding a lot of keywords into a web page to help rank in the search engines. In fact it was pretty easy to rank back then in the major search engines. Switch to today and you see three major engines and many safeguards in place by them to catch over-optimization and on or off page techniques used by modern search engine marketers.

Afraid of Search Engine Spiders?
Search engine spiders (aka crawlers, robots) are software programs designed to find links, read through text, follow links from page to page and index the individual web pages of a web site. If you know anything about software you know human beings create them. If you are a software tester then you definitely know how fallible software is. Remember how often your browser or your laptop crashes?

That is human programming for you. As smart as Google is as a company, software is software. It cannot compare to human evaluation. Google tries to use human observation in combination with their search engine spider software but automation is the only way the search engines are able to spot potential problems with so many web pages online. The reality is that there are too many web pages and automation is a must when evaluating content on the web.

Patterns in Optimization
Google is thought to have their search engine robot set to flag certain situations when indexing. One way to work against being caught up in this is by breaking the on page pattern of search engine optimization. Using keywords in your text navigation? Be sure to use some descriptive keyword phrases that make sense for your text navigation.

Do not use all keyword text in your text navigation, this may trigger a spam filter or flag from the search engines. Instead use only a few select keywords or keyword phrases in your text navigation. For Example keep the text link for pages like “Contact Us” and “About Us” text navigation links left intact. Be careful when using too much keyword text in links throughout the content of the page.

“Click here” is not a good choice for a link going to a product, of course you want descriptive text related to the product the page leads to instead. As with other over-optimization situations use this type of keyword text link sparingly through the content of your web pages. Make sure your text on the page is natural for the human visitor.

Patterns in Links and Link Building
If you need to break patterns in optimization code it only makes sense to break the same type of patterns when it comes to link building. If you have an articles page or helpful resource for users be sure to find on topic backlinks for those web pages.

Vary your keyword anchor text when acquiring links. You want a variety of keyword links pointing back to your pages that relate to the content of that web page. Using one url address for all your links? Use your homepage url and also a variety of inner pages to point your backlinks to.

Natural Optimization Is The Way To Go
If you focus on readable, natural looking page of text this will go a long way towards achieving your goal of breaking the patterns search engine spider software can detect in your page content and text links. Search engine spiders focus on text on the page and text links when indexing web pages. Vary your use of keywords and website urls for your backlinks. Provide sensible text navigation and title tags that are not overly optimized. By focusing on what website visitors need you can outsmart the search engines and gain website visitors.